How to Prepare and Care for your Floors This Winter

Top Tips from Eye Flooring
How to Prepare and Care for your Floors This Winter
With winter just around the corner, now is the time to prepare your floors and protect them from the onslaught of wetter and colder weather.

Your flooring is one of the most important and costly assets of your home and/or business and, with the weather becoming more unpredictable as the years go by, winter is the most potentially damaging season so it pays to make preparations to protect your flooring early. We have compiled a list of top tips to look after your floors, so no matter what type of flooring you have, they will last through whatever weather winter decides to throw at us this year:

How to Care for Hard Flooring During Winter
Naturally, regularly sweeping and hoovering your hard flooring will help prevent a buildup of dirt and mud getting trodden into your floors, but there are other ways to minimise the amount of wintery weather that does get brought inside posing a risk to your floors:

• Remove all outdoor boots and shoes before entering
• If you have a dog or cat, dry their paws each time they come back in from being outside
• Use a gentle solution to clean floors once a week with a microfibre mop, in store we stock Wear and Care kits from Amtico which are suitable to use on luxury vinyl tiles, vinyl or linoleum and FloorSpa kits by Harvey Maria which can be used on vinyl, rubber, linoleum, stone and ceramic floors. For natural wood floors care needs to be taken when choosing what to clean your floors with and this will all come down to its finish, we are retailers of Ted Todd wood flooring and recommend visiting their website for more information along with some handy instructional videos.
• If mud does get trampled inside, allow it to dry before clearing up, if you try and clean it up while wet little stones and grit could cause abrasions to the surface of your flooring
• If any salt is brought inside during colder, snowy weather this would need to be cleared up straight away so it does not damage the floor

How to Care for Carpet During Winter
Carpets and wet, wintery weather don’t mix but, as with hard flooring, there are ways you can protect it from getting damaged:

• Remove all outdoor boots and shoes before entering
• If you have a dog or cat, dry their paws each time they come back in from being outside
• Hoover your carpets once or twice a week
• In the event of any mud marking the carpet, use a stain remover such as Cybergold which is available in store and follow their directions for use.
Top Tip: Rub the stain remover into the carpet either in an up and down or left to right direction do not rub in a circular motion as in some carpets this may untie and loosen the pile.

General Floor Care Tips During Winter
These apply to both hard flooring and carpets and will help protect your floors from everything else that the colder weather brings:

• Put extra matting in entrances/exits and in high traffic areas to catch any sneaky bits of mud that cross the threshold. Mats such as Turtle Mat Doormats or Cotton Mucktrappers are ideal as they can be removed, brushed and machine washed as often as needed
• If you have an open fire, wool blend rugs should be placed in front of them over your flooring, this way they catch any sparks, coal, ash and wood debris rather than your actual floor. Wool or wool blend rugs are best as they won’t singe with rogue sparks the same way a synthetic carpet will.
• Though they prefer the warmer temperatures of summer, central heating can lure out carpet moths and you particularly need to be watchful of them in wool and wool blended carpets. Check for holes, small white eggs and the moths themselves burrowing into the pile. Unfortunately there is no way to exterminate carpet moths other than by replacing the carpet, if you suspect that you have them we can help talk you through alternative flooring options including our range of moth resistant carpets

There you have it, everything you need to know to keep your floors clean and safe this winter, now to sit back and snuggle up while the British weather does what it does best!

All the best

Eye Flooring X